Section 1 of the IRS Data Book provides a broad overview of the main functions performed by the IRS: processing Federal tax returns and collecting revenue. It also provides additional details on returns filed, returns filed electronically, gross collections, and tax refunds by State and type of tax.

Highlights of the Data

The IRS collected nearly $3.5 trillion in gross taxes in Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 (Tables 1 and 5) and issued more than 122 million refunds (Table 7), amounting to almost $464 billion (Tables 1 and 8).

The IRS processed more than 250.3 million Federal tax returns and supplemental documents (Tables 2 and 3).

Almost 179 million returns and other forms were filed electronically. These represented 71.5 percent of all filings, an increase of 1.0 percent over the share of electronic filing in FY 2017 (Table 4). Almost 88.0 percent of individual tax returns were filed electronically (Table 4).